What has just been said of the place which the university occupies in modern civilization, and more particularly of the manner in which it is to fill its place, may seem something of a fancy sketch. It is assuredly not a faithful description of any concrete case, by all means not of any given American university;nor does it faithfully describe the line of policy currently pursued by the directorate of any such establishment. Yet it is true to the facts, taken in a generalized way, and it describes the type to which the American schools unavoidably gravitate by force of the community's long-term idealistic impulsion, in so far as their drift is not continually corrected and offset by vigilant authorities who, from motives of their own, seek to turn the universities to account in one way and another. It describes an institutional ideal; not necessarily an ideal nursed by any given individual, but the ideal logically involved in the scheme of modern civilization, and logically coming out of the historical development of Western civilization hitherto, and visible to any one who will dispassionately stand aside and look to the drift of latterday events in so far as they bear on this matter of the higher learning, its advancement and conservation.
Many if not most of those men who are occupied with the guidance of university affairs would disown such a projected ideal, as being too narrow and too unpractical to fit into the modern scheme of things, which is above all else a culture of affairs; that it does not set forth what should be aimed at by any who have the good of mankind at heart, or who in any sensible degree appreciate the worth of real work as contrasted with the leisurely intellectual finesse of the confirmed scientist and man of letters. These and the like objections and strictures may be well taken, perhaps. The question of what, in any ulterior sense, ought to be sought after in the determination of academic policy and the conduct of academic affairs will, however, not coincide with the other question, as to what actually is being accomplished in these premises, on the one hand, nor as to what the long-term cultural aspirations of civilized men are setting toward, on the other hand.
Now, it is not intended here to argue the merits of the current cultural ideals as contrasted with what, in some ulterior sense, ought to be aimed at if the drift of current aspirations and impulse should conceivably permit a different ideal to be put into effect. It is intended only to set forth what place, in point of fact and for better or worse, the higher learning and the university hold in the current scheme of Western civilization, as determined by that body of instinctive aspirations and proclivities that holds this civilization to its course as it runs today; and further to show how and how far certain institutional factors comprised in this modern scheme of life go to help or hinder the realization of this ideal which men's aspirations and proclivities so make worth while to them.
The sketch here offered in characterization of the university and its work, therefore, endeavours to take account of the community's consensus of impulses and desires touching the animus and aims that should move the seminaries of the higher learning, at the same time that it excludes those subsidiary or alien interests in whose favour no such consensus is found to prevail.
